If this is your first visit, please click the Sign Up now button to begin the process of creating your account so you can begin posting on our forums! The Sign Up
process will only take up about a minute of two of your time.

Help me learn how to build a website

Hi,

I am a new registered user here. My interest is to start learning website development! Currently I have a project at hand, which I would like to build it by finding a course and build it while I learn. I would appreciate if you guys can lead me to fulfill this request.

I am looking to build a website for a school. The website has 3 different types of registrations; Educator, student, and parent. The student stores her activity and points and messages from teacher to her. The student can only see her profile. Educator log-in, he can add his single student or multiple students, can send messages to any of his students, can check status of them all. A parent can only view his son’s profile and read messages sent to him from his teacher.

What do you already know about programming? If you know nothing about programming right now, it would take you forever to learn enough to be able to do that. I've been learning how to program for five years now and I am still not able to do something as complicated as that.

You are correct. I am new to this world. I've seen many courses where you follow them on step-by-step basis. Usually it is a success once you do that. I couldn't find a course tailored as per my requirement. On the other hand being difficult is possible, but if we divide it, it will become easier. I believe it can be decided into these steps:

1) Building a website. Fairly easy
2) Creating a separate track for each type. Not easy.
3) Create different types of accounts when signing up. Not easy, but very common. Also training courses for single type sign-up is very much available.

The problem with the tutorials that promise to teach you something quickly is that, most of the time, they just encourage cargo-cult coding (coding without a decent understanding of how the code you type is supposed to work). Memorizing snippets of code without actually understanding them is usually worse than nothing. Programmers don't spend most of their time coding, they spend most of their time searching for the errors in their code. If you don't understand how the code is supposed to work, you can't find an error in it (it is often hard to find an error in a program even if you fully understand how it's supposed to work).

The tutorials on w3schools appear relatively good. It seems to me I've learnt quite a lot from them without putting a lot of effort. I mean, I learnt the client-side programming there. They also feature some server-side programming tutorials there, but I haven't looked too much into them, so I can't attest they are good. Server-side programming is considered harder than the client-side programming, and that's what you would have to master to build the website you describe.

And, no, building a nice-looking website is not as easy as you might think. It took me a lot less time to learn JavaScript well enough to be able to make a PacMan game in it than to learn CSS well enough to be able to make a website. I am not saying CSS is hard, in fact, it's very easy once you get into it. But it's, well, strange, it was unlike anything I was familiar with in programming. JavaScript is quite similar to C++ I was already somewhat familiar with.

OK, now, I didn't mean to scare you. If you are interested in how the Internet works, go to w3schools. The tutorials I've looked into there seem quite nice and easy to understand, but somewhat incomplete (there are some quite nice tricks they don't teach you there). If you'd like to learn those advanced stuff in building websites, look into the tutorials on MDN. But if you think you can learn how to build a nice-looking website in a few days, I am afraid you are going to be fairly disappointed. After I've been learning programming for almost five years, it took me four months to learn enough web-development to be able to build a website like mine.

Mason John

Omaru is right. i learn all your comments its many helpfull for students. first thing you can easily learn many online portal about design and development. many companies here in onlie they create a lots of website today in global market. but i thought you can learn many video portal like youtube and and others.

We build a range of responsive websites for businesses throughout Derby. Stylistic Design is a leading design agency servicing the whole of the UK.Stylistic make great marketing accessible to all businesses. Flexible, budget-friendly marketing services that work for your business, budget, & goals. We specialise in creative Website Design. Visit our Derby office or call friendly team for more on 01332 208069.